21st Century Afropolitan

Nana Addo and Putin (Socchi, 2019) Dear comrade...ehmmm, well your excellency Mr. President Putin (since you are no longer a leader of a socialist republic but a consummate overlord of billionaires in an oligarchic state much like the rest of the world, I can't refer to you as a comrade. Forgive my nick picking but I wanted to address you properly. But I digress. Venerable White Bear of the Russian federation, I have advice for you regarding the choices before you and the consequences of whichever of them you make. Mr. President, you need to decide whether you want to live in the Washington-created world as a vassal state or you want to be an enemy of Washington and by so doing finding your own rival world system to live in. Right now what you are doing is demanding to have a cake you have just finished eating. And as the saying goes, you can't eat your cake and have it. Let me explain. I do not know, either by negligence, lack of foresight, or sheer incompetence or weakness, t

Image Source: the Sun Newspaper. The China and Taiwan impasse is a rather simple issue of leadership arguing over who has authority over who. Modern Taiwan was established by a government (Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government) who were ousted by rebels (Chairman Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party).   Chiang Kai-shek's government ran away to the Chinese Island territory of Taiwan (or Formosa in the Western literature) after Mao's Communist rebels won the Chinese civil war. Both Chiang Kai-shek's government and the Communist government by Mao claimed authority over all of China (mainland and Taiwan) after the Civil War. So the official name of Taiwan according to Chiang Kai-shek and his predecessors in Taiwan is the Republic of China(ROC). The victorious communists, for obvious reasons, named their country the Peoples Republic of China(PRC).   Realpolitik led to the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek's ROC (Taiwan) losing international recognition as

  Source: BBC Research Why was NATO formed? The realpolitik answer is that in part it was mostly formed to defend member countries against possible attack by the Soviet Union. At the time of its founding and early years, Germany (West Germany occupied by the Americans and East Germany occupied by the Soviets) alongside all the countries to the east had not joined the alliance.   All countries east of Germany were under Soviet influence in one form or another till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The immensity of the Soviet union one might argue necessitated the existence of NATO. Of course the other unsaid reason for NATO's existence is the fact that Europeans are rather fond of killing each other as history will attest . So, all or most of Europe, including perpetual enemies France and England, being part of one military alliance is a panacea to their fondness for occasional bloodletting.   When the Soviet leadership allow ed for the reunification of Germany and allowed t